Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Spooky.

Another two cents (we should save up for a gumball...)

Translating the article away from its own overdramtization to two key points:
1. Training in reading at an early age has indifferent long term returns and can actually have negative effects in attitude.
2. Children should work with reading material that matches their optimal challenge level.

She is a reading spcialist; I'm going to hypothesize that she sees kids who struggle early and kids who stumble later. Total sampling bias.

It's also the regular rotten tomato back-splash from the hyper-achievers who actually show up as statistically signficant, particularly anecdotally.

I see what you're both saying now, and agree somewhat. But the thing about the OP's link was that this teacher is arguing that precocious readers haven't mastered reading but have only given the appearance of having mastered it, and then everyone catches up (presumably in third grade). Her goofy analogy about teeth is that they grow at a certain rate that you can't accelerate, just like you can't accelerate the rate at which kids learn to read.

A really bad thing about that article is that she talks about children needing to be able to pick up nuances from texts, but completely fails to see nuances in how (and how fast) different children learn to read.

Constrained by what the child can reasonably be expected to understand (relative to the individual, not a group), I'd say.

This.

If material is too hard, the intrinsically motivated child just won't read it all. Does this mean that the child shouldn't be allowed to bump up against the ceiling of his/her ability? I'd say no. That's where learning occurs (and interest is piqued)!

I led my DD to explore the nonfiction adult section of our public library when she was 5-6yo. And then I barely batted an eye when she set aside chapter books to re-read her old picture books. The message was the same: no limits; read whatever you want.


I disagree with encouraging, nevermind forcing, anyone of any literary ability to read either of the above, because, bleh.

Exactly this.

This philosophy of "don't let them read anything with a scary big word" seems to me to assume that children's interest in reading is extremely fragile and terribly easy to destroy. I suppose it can be at times, but I think children who WANT to read a book should not be discouraged, for God's sake. IIRC, when Harry Potter first broke out and got big, there was a lot of excited crowing about how it got a ton of kids into reading who had never been into it before--even reluctant readers or those who were rather low ability for grade. Some of those kids finally "got" reading for pleasure due to HP. Heaven forbid that some well-meaning adult should have forbidden them access.

I think this is more about interest. Great Expectations can be a very boring book to many adults. The story isn't necessary of interest to a 7 year old. The story is convoluted with multiple plots lines, and characters. It is not a book I would think a 7 year old would be interested in. It's one of the reason I found non fiction the best way at that age to challenge the reading ability, while keeping the subject interesting.

One of the fallacies in Rachel Zivic's analysis is that she assumes there is one "right" way to read. This is an academic perspective and not very pragmatic.

In my daily job, I need to read a lot of material. Speed and the ability to rapidly extract essential points are far more important than deep comprehension.

A well-balanced society requires diversification. We need people with different variants of skill across all fields.

The key to effective teaching is to feed the natural passions of children. If a kid loves to read, it's ridiculous to withhold books. If a kid loves to pore over complex equations and guess at their meaning, it's silly to tell him he can't.

Many of the world's greatest geniuses were once children who had the passion to learn and pushed themselves well beyond the limits of their understanding and eventually beyond the understanding of everyone else as well.

The ability to stretch beyond the need for prerequisites and synthesize knowledge for oneself is a valuable skill. It should be encouraged wherever it's found.

Oh, that's definitely not the case for my daughter (or for me, either at that age)-- I loved language. Loved prose, loved poetry... just... loved WORDS, and I loved the narrative and dialogue, too. Great Expectations is a deliciously complex story.

DD found the story very engaging. It was Dickens' writing that she wasn't prepared for at the time. Definitely. She was smitten with the story itself. She loves (and always has, evidently) the multiple-narrative device in fiction. She did polish off a 'juvenile' version of the book intended for middle school audiences just fine-- but then wasn't that interestedin slogging through the original after she knew the story, see.

She could have cared less about most non-fiction then. She liked sci-fi and fantasy (Susan Cooper's Dark is Rising, L'Engle's Wrinkle in Time series, etc), and to a lesser extent, contemporary realistic fiction. Thrillers and horror came slightly later. Biography, some was interesting enough to her-- but not all.

So I'd say "if you've seen one young consumer of literature, you've seen one." I do not believe that all elementary students respond well to a diet heavy in non-fiction. Some do, of course-- but there are many who don't, too, because it isn't that interesting to them personally. I think that CCSS makes this error in the early grades, quite honestly.

She has never had a problem reading whatever interested her. Period. Now, I recognize that she isn't most kids, but I cringe to think that she might have been restricted from reading as she liked by some well-intended but (frankly) ignorant teacher or school staffer. Luckily we've been blessed with city librarians that have always been ready, willing, and happy to help her find what she was after. Regardless of her age.

Heh, what do they do at school after the middle of the class masters decoding? They teach them comprehension through oral and written book reports. A few years later the class masters the basic retelling of a story, then they teach them more comprehension by explaining themes in literature and such. I think reading comprehension is one of the things they teach in school. I think they forgot to teach the early reader because if she didn't already know it then she sure wasn't ready to be taught it. C'mon. Teach those kids something.